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Wiring a House While It's Still Being Built?
digitalamish asks: "Back in 2001 Slashdot had this Ask Slashdot about wiring a new house for networking. Some of the comments in that discussion talked about running fiber vs cat5e. It's more than two year later, I'm starting to build a house, and I'd like to update this topic. So, what's the current state of people's thinking. Is good old Cat-5e still good enough, is fiber a better option? What about other options like Cat-6? Or with the state of wireless, is wiring a house even worth it any more?"
Run all your transports outside the wall interior to the rooms. Blue pipe for outgoing water, red for incoming. Plastic channel surface mounted raceways for communication links. Gray electrical conduit. Black mat painted hvac. Choose your own colors. Run things in parallel. Come together. Fan out. Make a statement.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand I like being able to hear everything, on the other hand I like it to not sound like crap.
Y'know when you go to a outdoor sports game and there's a lot of reverb to the announcer's loudspeaker-blared voice? That's because there are a lot of speakers and sound comes out of all of them at essentially the same time, but then travels to your ears along longer or shorter paths, causing you to hear fuzzed up sound.
Obviously, it'll be better in a house, which should have more sound absorbers such as rugs and sofas, and unless you're building a mansion, we're not talking about little-leauge-field proportions, however, if I were an audiophile I'd stay far away from this.
Or another though occurs: have motion sensors throughout the house which only turn on the speakers in rooms where people were last detected. That way if you have 8 rooms wired but only 1 person home, you get sound that follows you around, and no reverb.
you can recycle the motion sensors for home security or MrHouse
That hit the nail on the head. If you do the conduit right, with nice big
junction boxes at *all* corners, conduit running to multiple locations in
every room, and so on, then you can run whatever kind of cable you want at
any time in the future very easily. Audio cable, video cable, fibre, Cat12b,
you name it, you'll be able to run it. What kind of network cable will you
(or whoever lives there) want in fifteen years? Fifty years? You have no
clue, right now. But you know it'll be easy to run it; take a screwdriver,
take the faceplates off, pull the cable through, and you know who Bob is.
One more thing:
> Run all your conduit to a central location (probably in the basement).
> You'll want a nice (rack even?) open area that you can mount equipment
> as well as patch panels, etc. Wire ties are your friend.
If it were me, I'd put nice boxes (kinda like a breaker box, but without the
breakers) every fifty feet or so around the outside wall of the basement, with
a nice fat conduit running straight up from each one to a junction box,
accessible at the top by removing a faceplate (like a lightswitch cover).
In any part of the basement that's going to be "finished", I'd also run
horizontal conduit between these boxes. I'd put an electrical outlet near
each of these boxes, so that a hub or switch can easily be put there.
Then, N years from now, when you want to run your new Terabit Ethernet cable
or whatever from the sewing room to the kitchen, you pick one of the empty
faceplates in the sewing room, run the cable from there to the nearest
junction box and down to the box in the basement, where you put a hub. In
the kitchen you do the same thing; then you run a cable around the horizontal
conduit to connect your hubs, and you're done; with a hub at each of the
basement boxes, you never need more than one horizontal cable of any given
type, no matter how many things you run in the room above.
So, you want more faceplates than you need right now in every single room
(yes, the bathroom; yes, the garage, too; I'd put one in each closet also),
and a system of conduit connecting them all. You do NOT want to have to
tear up your drywall later because there's not conduit going to such-and-such
a location.
This isn't cheap; conduit costs more than cable. It costs less than redoing
your drywall later, though. Run the conduit. You'll be glad you did.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Wiring is cheap at this point in the building process. Pull some Cat5e and fiber and be done with it.
Or do you want to make it easier for your neighbors to spy on that nasty little pr0n habit you have? While those signals will have trouble getting from one corner of the house to the next (especially between floors) you can bet someone will be able to eavesdrop easily. Wireless security isn't very secure. Parabolic antenna not included. Quiet Ashcroft, I'm typing here...
Sorry, anyway. Wired is more secure, faster, and you can always add a wireless node or two for the laptop when doing non-sensitive browsing. I would firewall that connection from my LAN.
Don't want that cheezy windows laptop being a vector for attacks, eh?
Here come da fudge!
- Three RG-6 to every bedroom. You can use these to run Dish, DirecTV, or Cable. You want two in case you want a dual-tuner DVR. You can put HDTV (antenna) signals on the same wire as the satellite signals with an inexpensive diplexor. Digital cable doesn't play nice, so run a 3rd line just in case.
- Four RG-6 for the main TV room. Two for a DVR, one if you want to add HDTV, one if you want digital cable.
- Four Cat5e to every bedroom. Three for networking (gigabit), one for phone
- Five Cat5e for the main TV room. Four for devices (XBox, DVR, Media Viewer, HTPC, etc.), one for phone (you can split it for multiple devices).
- Terminate all lines at an MDF (wiring closet). If you have cable installed, have the line run here - you can use that line for your cable modem and/or conenct it to the RG6 lines for (digital) cable. Have your phone wiring run here - you can run it all over the house through your extra cat5e lines; you can also use it if you want DSL. Run lines from your satellite dish here; you can put your multiswitch here (it is indoors, climate controlled, has power, and every RG6 line terminates here - what more do you want) Make sure you have power here two; a 15A grounded outlet should suffice. If you have the room, you may want to put a file server here as well - make sure you have shelving that will support your gear. This wiring closet should have ventilation and heat like any other room.
- Run all of your wires through 2" or 3" conduit. Avoid tight bends. Run string through for pulling future wires. You may want to upgrade later.
- Label everything. Every plate should be numbered, every jack should be lettered. Use a letter to differentiate between coax/fiber/UTP. For example, plate 5, UTP Cat5e, jack 1 could be labeled 5UA. Plate 5, RG6 Coax, jack 1 could be labled 5CA. Punchdowns should be labeled accordingly at the MDF.
- If you have a computer room or den, run extra cat5e. Perhaps up to five. Beyond five, it makes sense to put a switch in your den.
- If you have notebooks, get an 802.11b (or 802.11g, if you want the bandwidth) access point. You can put it in your MDF.
Because we wired our house like this, it was easy to switch the entire house from cable to DSL. No rewiring required. We could even switch from DirecTV to Dish or cable without much hassle.
Cute story, and I'm sure that General Contractor is still doing brisk business after the story broke on the local news. NOT! It still sounds like a contrived story. Even if you don't "own" the house yet, the contractor is still getting paid with YOUR money. Many construction loans are structured such that the owner must approve each release of money from the bank to the contractor. If the owner is not happy, the contractor gets no money. Now, usually the contractor does ok just by sticking to the terms of the contract, so if you don't have the conduit in the contract, he can probably get away with not putting it in. OTOH, since few contractors ever do an absolutely perfect job and always slop on this or that, the owner could enforce the contract to the letter in retribuition--such as fit-and-finish requirements, maximum distance of fasteners on drywall etc. These are the sorts of things that most contractors I've seen tend to be sloppy on, so the owner could throw the book at him and make the rest of the contract fulfillment living hell.
Overall it's still in the contractor's best long-term interest to please his customers. General contractors live and die by their reputation. Prospective customers usually call the last three or four clients of a contractor to see if they were satisfied. If a contractor did things like ripping out client's self-installed stuff, he wouldn't be getting too many more contracts.
I just moved into my new house just over a month ago.
The builder allowed me to run network cable, after I signed a waiver (if I hurt/kill myself it's my fault).
Anyway, the catch was that the builder, while nice enough to let me run network, specified that I was *not* to run conduit, nor any coax, nor any 'telephone cable' (yes, I know).
In any case, what I did:
-each of the 3 upstairs bedrooms got 2 boxes with 2 wires each; one cat5e, the other cat6.
-family room also got 2 boxes with the same pair of drops each, PLUS speaker wire running from where the TV is to the place behind where the couch is going (note kitchen and family room are essentially the same room, and can share one of those boxes)
-one box in the dining room with the same pair
-one box in the living room with the same pair
-all of the above came out of two 1000' spools. It was more than enough for my ~1700 sq.ft. home.
The catch?
-builder cut my speaker wire on both sides in the basement (bastards). Claimed it got in the way when they were installing the air-return duct. I have no recourse (since it was on their property at the time, right?)
-network cable all went to the basement. ALL of it got unravelled and thrown in tangled heaps everywhere. ALL of it got unlabelled. No joke, I still have 5 wires that I need to identify. Again, no recourse.
Moral of the story? Get an agreement from the builder to allow you to put stuff in... but don't expect that they won't mess with your stuff.
On the other hand, while it is tedious to have to identify all the cable (and irritating that I have to splice my speaker cable), having the wires in the wall was the best thing I could have done. I'm reasonably happy with the outcome, and though I wish I could have gotten conduit in, I don't think I'll really need it - I'll probably move before I need upgraded cable. And yes, I DO plan on using my spare wire to run telephone (although the builder doesn't know that that's possible, don't tell them).
Thus far I've only bothered to wire all of the upstairs cat5e drops. I presently don't have the need (nor the equipment) to run anything faster. I'll get around to the cat6 drops eventually. I keep the cable modem and the Linksys router in the basement.
As for the lack of coax? No problem - I don't have TV service right now (nor a TV... yet). Don't have it, don't really miss it. However, once I do, I plan on having a nice MythTV setup, and since the server will be in the basement, having coax in the rest of the house should be unnecessary (though by default I *did* get coax installed by the builder in the family room and master bedroom).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I always liked this story:
TRAINED RAT USED TO STRING COMPUTER CABLES
Rattie, Judy Reavis's trained rat, is being used to string computer cables
in hard-to-reach places in California school buildings. The rat clenches
string in its teeth, and then follows the path of least resistance inside
the walls, along ceiling panels and under floors. The rat goes to an exit
point identified by tapping sounds and is rewarded with cat food. Computer
cable is attached to the string and pulled through the path used by the
rat. Dr. Reavis, a biophysicist and physician, was volunteering for NetDay
2000, the school computer project, when a co-worker mentioned a failed
effort to train a rat in wiring. Dr. Reavis thought of her adopted
laboratory rat and built a maze of plastic pipe in her Benecia, California,
home to train the rat. It took about 20 minutes a day for three months to
train Rattie to negotiate the maze, avoid dead ends, and travel toward
tapping sounds.
Frederick Rose, "Need an Electrician? Here's One Who Works Both
Fast and Cheap" The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1997, B1
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
This is why the country is all messed up. Sure the homeowner doesn't 'own' the house yet but he's still using HIS own money ( borrowed or not ).
Current non-extreme 802.11g (54mbit) solutions are capable of about 20mbit actual throughput. Therefore I'd assume that future 108mbit standards (I recall reading about one that's rating was planned to be 108mbit, and I'm not talking about an "extreme" mode) would increase that to ~40mbit. While wireless networks are indeed a shared medium, the primary use of any home network is to share an internet connection, which rarely go over 10mbit in speed. For sending files accross a network, 40mbit is currently sufficient for most people.
However, as I noted in my original post, wireless technology is advancing at a much more rapid pace than wired ethernet. By the time 1000baseT is not fast enough (I'm certain it will be MANY years before this is the case), I'm sure there will be a wireless standard that can replace it; perhaps some medium-range ultra-wideband solution.
What I'm trying to say is, there is no need for anything better than Cat5e or Cat6 cabling; they both support gigabit speeds, which is more than sufficient for even the most demanding power useres, and will remain so for a great deal of time to come; most people would not notice if their network were suddenly switched to 10mbit half duplex, as their internet connection would still be shared at full speed.
Also, please note that half-duplex does not mean that a network will max out at 25% of capacity. In fact, it will max out at 100% of capacity; a 10mbit half-duplex network shared among several machines will still allow 10mbit (or something more like 7-8mbit due to other concerns) of aggregate traffic to pass over the network. Keep in mind that full-duplex means that a network can transfer 200% of it's rated speed (100mbit networks can do 200mbit if you combine outgoing and incomming data).
Skimmed the discussion so far and didn't see this:
Especially with long long cable runs, leave service loops - extra wire at each end - of maybe 2-10 extra feet of wire, depending upon how much you tend to use up when repairing a busted jack/plug/punchdown.
There is nothing worse than having to run a new 50' line because the person who did it first ran *exactly* the amount needed, and then someone tripped over a patch cable and ripped the cable out of the jack and the jack out of the wall and there's no spare cable to fix the punchdowns on the jack...
(Now, mind you, what I did *that* time was to put a new plug onto the in-wall wire, then attach a short length of spare cable to the jack, put a jack on the other end of *that*, and plug that into the in-wall. Kludge city.)
sgfc, CCNA
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
If you are planning on supporting your company network from home, you will need to get your company approval before you can put their data on your home wireless network. Just because you have the technology at home doesn't mean that you have the right to broadcast company data all over. This is especially true if you work in a medical environment with HIPAA. JHMO.